Ukrainian Jewel Box with William Stubbs

A cottage in Kiev opens to unexpected treasures

William W. Stubbs laughs at the suggestion that he's become the interior design czar of the former Soviet Union. But with more than a half-dozen projects under way in former Soviet republics—they range from a two-story penthouse in downtown Moscow to a castle outside Kiev—the Houston-based designer has unrivaled experience in working in places where interior design was an alien concept when he started almost a decade ago. Along the way he has overcome a preconsumer economy (in the beginning, even screwdrivers and screws had to be shipped from the United States) and personal risk—among his misadventures, he's been rattled awake by car bombs, summarily deported for a minor error in his visa and rousted by state security agents with drawn guns. How Stubbs has done things in the former Soviet empire, however, is even more impressive than that he's done them at all: He's inspired an extraordinary revival of almost forgotten Old World traditions amid the post-glasnost rush to modernity.

The prototype for all of Stubbs's projects in the former Soviet Union is an elegant little gem of a guest cottage tucked away behind a lavishly reinvented 19th-century-style country manor—also Stubbs's work—in Kiev (see Architectural Digest, December 1998). Originally built by prison-camp labor for the Ukrainian Communist Party boss, the 20-acre estate was purchased by a Ukrainian-born American businessman who had escaped Stalin's murderous regime while still a boy; after the collapse of the Soviet system, he returned as an unpaid economic adviser to the president of the new republic of Ukraine. Behind the Stalin-era main house (with the red hot-line telephone to the Kremlin still sitting on a nightstand), Stubbs and his client discovered a caretaker's dwelling that was far from charming at first take. "We walked through waist-high weeds to come to this abandoned cottage with paper walls and wavy linoleum floors," Stubbs says. "It reminded me of little houses I had visited in small towns in Texas. But once we'd seen the entire estate, I was just drawn back to that little-bitty house. I saw it as a Black Forest cottage, a sort of Hansel and Gretel retreat."

"I thought of the rooms as jewel boxes where you're filling up every corner with something beautiful and interesting."

Aside from its ultimate role as a guesthouse, he also saw the cottage as a temporary residence that could be finished considerably more quickly than the grandly ambitious main house. But as with the larger house, Stubbs and his client resisted the speediest and most cost-effective approach, which would have been to tear everything down and start over. "The usual practice was to bring in foreign labor and materials, scrape the ground clean and build something in a modern German or Italian style that had no relationship to anything Ukrainian. My client and I wanted to be respectful of what was already there, using the materials and labor we could find locally."

That approach confined Stubbs, who has done several major historic preservation projects in the United States, to the tiny footprint of the existing cottage (a nine-by-12-foot Persian carpet provides wall-to-wall coverage in the living room). "We put in new windows and put on a new roof," he says. "We raised the ceiling and exposed the beams in the living room to carry your eye up. In some rooms we weren't able to do that, so you have low ceilings. We just appreciated the house for what it was." But the determination to stick to indigenous labor and materials soon produced significant dividends. "We found that copper was easy to come by in Ukraine," recalls Stubbs, who usually encountered only shortages; even lumber had to be custom-cut-and-milled. "These local craftsmen took copper sheets and scaled the whole roof with them, almost like a fish. It was stunning to see how carefully they crafted the copper."

Another notable local resource was the sizable community of artists he discovered in Kiev's massive, numbingly impersonal Soviet-era apartment blocks. In one of the cottage's bedrooms, he has clustered views of Kiev's churches and cathedrals, painted by Kievan artists in an accomplished 19th-century academic style no longer taught in the West. "Most of them are winter scenes, somewhat chilly-looking," Stubbs says, "but because of the opulence of the bedcoverings, you feel warm looking at them."

He also found himself sought out by local artists and craftsmen, such as the wood-carver who presented him with a small wooden box. "He was a wonderful man who really wanted to participate in the project," Stubbs remembers. "But although the little box was very nice, it gave me no idea what he could do. So I gave him a small sketch of some ideas for outdoor furniture, just before I had to leave the site for six weeks." He returned to find a set of chairs and ottomans beautifully carved with native folk patterns in kiln-dried wood; they became the prized furnishings of the cottage's tranquil garden terrace. "It's a beautiful courtyard that gives a sense of sitting in the middle of the forest," he observes. "You feel like you're a hundred miles from civilization."

"All the fabrics are tactile and luxurious, things you can cover up in, feel cozy and warm in. We re-created this sense of Old World luxury," says the designer.

The interior is nothing if not civilized, however: more reminiscent of Anna Karenina than Hansel and Gretel. "I thought of the rooms as jewel boxes where you're filling up every corner with something beautiful, something interesting, something comfortable," says the designer, who relied on 19thcentury furnishings and richly textured fabrics to not only suggest dense layers of pre-Soviet history but provide a sense of warmth in the often frosty climate. "All the fabrics are tactile and luxurious, things you can cover up in, feel cozy and warm in," he notes. "We recreated this sense of Old World luxury in a really small amount of square footage. And it was all a precursor of what was to come in the large house and the rest of the estate."

More important, in the view of Stubbs and his client, the history-conscious style of the cottage taught local professionals the potential of their own heritage. "When we started, none of our construction people had ever seen a really nice house. They couldn't understand why we wanted this patina on everything, this layer of age. They were so discouraged. They loved having that brand-spanking-new look. But when we finished with the guest cottage, everyone understood. I think we earned the respect of everyone involved in the project by how carefully we honored this little cottage."

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